


The Wrong Side of Fear

by mrsvc



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cancer, Coping, Gen, M/M, Parent Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-19
Updated: 2012-04-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 22:41:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mrsvc/pseuds/mrsvc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles was nine. He thinks that it was a fundamentally unfair age for his mother to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Side of Fear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Menacherie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Menacherie/gifts).



> Written for Menacherie's Prompt: "Stiles finds out that the Bite would have saved his mom."   
> Inspired by and title from "Dear Death, Part Two" by Emery.

Stiles was nine. He thinks that it was a fundamentally unfair age for his mother to die, but then remembers he was seven when she started chemo. He was seven years old and hyper and loud and not at all the angel his mother said he was. Except, it didn't matter how many things he'd broken on accident that day, or how loud he turned the TV up, or if he didn't eat his Brussels sprouts, when he pillowed his head on what would have been his mother's breasts before the surgery, she called him her "guardian angel."

Stiles can remember her, from before, which is part of what makes it so unfair. If he had been much younger, he would have forgotten. His mother would have always been a pale skeleton, clinging to life in the hospital bed his father had rented and installed in their bedroom. She would have always been bald, and bony, and cold. Stiles thinks he could have accepted that. He would have accepted that his mother didn't have the energy to play with him and that laying in a hot bath for hours on end was the only thing she could do to keep warm. He can remember being seven and a half, though, laboriously working towards eight like it was the finish line of some great race, and whining at his mother because she couldn't take him to Scott's house.

"Your Father's at work," she panted, collapsing back on her bed, her head in her hands. Stiles knows she's been vomiting again, can smell it on her breath and in the house.

"Dad's always at work," he pouted. "And Scott's mom's always at work. And you're always sick."

He can remember, even now, the way she used to breathe. It had a faint wheeze to it, a sucking sound as if she was working too hard to do it, and it echoed around their silent house. Stiles used to think, when he was a kid, that she was always tired because she breathed like that all the time. It sounded exhausted, and exhausting, all at the same time. It wasn't until he was 16 years old, and eight and a half years older, that he found out that that was what dying sounded like.

"I know," she sighed, the scarf covering her head slipping off as she pushed back against the pillows. "I know, angel."

"Get better," he frowned, and it was an entirely selfish command. He wanted her better for him, because he wanted the mother he'd had before, and he wanted someone who could do more for him than smile weakly when he came home from school.

"I will," she ran a thin hand over the short, bristly hairs on his head. "I am. For you. I'm fighting this, for you."

But she didn't get better. She kept taking chemotherapy, demanding with the only strength she could that her doctor mix up something new, and she would glare angrily at his father when he would kiss her hand and tell her to stop.

"Darling," Stile had heard his father call her. It was a broken endearment, and Stile thought it sounded like his dad was crying. He wasn't supposed to listen in at doorways, but since everyone was keeping secrets from him these days, he surely wasn't going to start obeying that rule any time soon. "The medicine's killing you worse."

"You want me to give up?" Stiles was a little scared of his mother, because that wasn't her sick voice. This was a voice he'd never heard before, even when she was well. "You want me to sign the DNR? You want me to call the nurse who I know you've got on speed dial?”

"No," his father said firmly. "No, no, God, no. Jesus, I just want- I want you to go out with some dignity, damn it! I want you to be awake, and strong, until the very end. I want you to say goodbye to your son, and kiss me, and fall asleep, like a dream. You want a ventilator? You want to be put in a coma and you want to die there? I'll do whatever you want me to, because-" His father stops and takes in a shuddering breath. "I'll do it because I love you, and I will fight for you. But baby, you got to stop killing yourself on some experimental pipe dream. You've got to accept that- that you're going to die. And that there's nothing left for us to do now but let it happen, and to do right by our son." Stiles could hear his mother crying behind the door and his father whispering things he couldn't make out.

She died on a Thursday, while Stiles was at school. Scott's mom picked him up, which would have been awesome, except she was crying. She was sobbing fat and heavy tears discolored with mascara. Part of the reason that Scott and Stiles were friends was because of their moms. They had been friends, and they had been ecstatic when they had both gotten pregnant just a few months shy of each other, and their sons were born in the same hospital, just weeks apart. Stiles and Scott - they'd shared everything, right down to baby clothes and teething rings and sometimes a crib when afternoon naps became fashionable when they were toddlers.

Later, when his mom got sick, it was Melissa who took care of her. Stiles saw a lot of things that he didn't realize what it meant until he was older: he saw Scott's mom bathing his mother in her hospital bed, changing the sheets every single day, patiently sitting at her side while spooning watery chicken broth into her blistered and sore mouth. Melissa was a nurse, and Stiles knew that nurses took care of people. When he was older, he sort of realized how much it meant for them both, his mom and Scott's, that it was Melissa who did all these things for her, instead of a stranger.

He was nine years old when Melissa put him and Scott into miniature matching suits, silently held Scott down and brushed his errant hair, and took them to her funeral. Stiles doesn't remember what songs they sang, or what the preacher said, or the names of all the people who patted his head and kissed his cheeks and cried over him. He does remember what it sounded like when his dad broke down on his knees next to his mother's casket, and Stiles' uncle had to wrap his arms around his father and almost carry him back to a pew. He remembers what perfume Mrs McCall was wearing and how it smelled and the way Scott held his hand for the whole day. He remembers going home to find their bedroom, his parent's bedroom, empty because the hospital bed had been dismantled and shipped back to the rental company.

He got a library card. Since he was so little, his dad had to co-sign with him for it, but he asked for a library card and a bike for Christmas that year, and that's what he got. His father becomes a stranger to him, because he can remember him from before too. He can remember when his dad was happy, and engaged, and smiling. Now his dad drags himself to work, and to bed, and to the dinner table, like he'd lost the will to live when his wife didn't anymore. His dad lets him go to the library by himself, which is good, because Stiles doesn't think his dad would appreciate the books he was reading anyway. He got books bigger than his head down from tip-top shelves and looked for the word "cancer" in the back. He was a smart kid, all the teachers at school told him so, but he lacked focus, so the doctors gave him pills that just amped him up further. Even so, the words in these books were too big for him, and he didn't understand anything he was reading anyway. He angrily wiped tears out of his eyes before they dropped on the glossy, textbook pages and ruined them. He didn't think his dad would like it if he had to pay to replace it.

He felt it, then; his first panic attack. The weight of the textbook and his grief crushed his chest and he tried, vainly, to take in a breath deep enough to sate him. He had no control over the way his throat seemed to have squeezed shut, and the tears streaming down his cheeks were due to fear, overwhelming fear. His mother was dead, his father needs him, and he's too young, and too stupid, and too hyper to do this on his own.

"Something the matter, champ?" the librarian asked, hitching up his pants and squatting beside Stiles from where he was crying like a baby curled up against the shelves in the non-fiction section.

"No," he gasped and refused to look at him. Just because Beacon Hills was small didn't mean that everyone knew him, or his mom, or what happened. The librarian glanced at the book still laying open on his lap. Stiles felt the weight lift a little from his chest just having someone there with him, to help him. He was still shaky from it, fingers twitching from where he had them clutched in his t-shirt.

"Cancer," he read. "That's pretty heavy."

"I don't understand it," Stiles said to the empty air to the left of him.

"Well," the librarian slid the book onto his own lap, and he settled on the floor next to Stiles. "Let's see if I can help. What do you want to know?"

The librarian sat there for a few hours, tried to take words like cellular proliferation, contact inhibition, and metastasis and make them small and attainable for Stiles. They combed the kid's section and read every book about cancer they could find. He slowly started to understand why his mother had had breast cancer that became bone cancer and why the chemo made her so sick. It didn't really tell him why, though; it told him how. The only thing it really did was give Stiles his first A+ in science the semester they studied mitosis.

Life moved on. Seasons changed. Scott's mom got a new job, and another new job, and another new job. Stiles' dad threw himself into his work, and he and Scott pretty much jumped between detention and lacrosse practice. His panic attacks waxed and waned, but he managed it. It doesn't seem like much, but it's what they had going for them now. And then the Hale house burns down and a whole bunch of people die.

Stiles knows about it because he listens in on his police scanner (and exactly how else is he supposed to engage with his father if he doesn't know the intimate details of his work? Thank you) and because he sees Derek and Laura Hale's eyes the next day. They are checking someone into Scott's mom's work, and he can tell that it's bad from the way the aides cringe and the nurses clutter nervously around the bed. Laura Hale shakes hands, stiffly but politely, with the head nurse at the long term facility, before she and her brother pack it into her car and peel out. He was going over there to bring Melissa lunch because he had always been a much better son than Scott is and also because he wanted to see if it was true, that everyone had died except for those three. He didn't need to interrogate Mrs McCall about it, because he could tell. It didn't matter how old you were, when you lost someone you loved, you always look like a scared little kid again. That was exactly how the Hales had looked. He ate the ham sandwich himself and went home.

When he finds out that the Hales had high-tailed it to New York, he gets really angry at them. They had left a bunch of the infamous Hale fortune behind to care for whoever they'd checked into the care place, and never looked back. He thinks it's unfair that they didn't have to stay behind and try to rebuild their empty shell of a house, like he did. They moved into a place that didn't remind them of who they had lost every single day, and didn't have to beg, plead, and cajole their father into sleeping in a real bed in his bedroom instead of leaving it as empty as it had been on the day of her funeral. They didn't have to get up early for school and make their dad breakfast because otherwise he'd just live off of shitty coffee and the stereotypical doughnuts of small town law enforcement.

He was 15 and a freshmen in high school when the doctor told his dad to start "watching out for your heart." Stiles didn't like the vagueness of that statement, so he might have-sort of convinced Danny into teaching him a thing or two about computers and hacking. At least he was using his powers for good, he justified to himself as he read the word "hyperlipidemia" in his father's medical record. He wasn't nine anymore, and home computer use had skyrocketed since then, so he turned to Google. He took notes on what it meant, on how to stop it, what to eat and what to avoid. He loved Google, more than he loved lunch and Scott and comic books all put together, and that was a lot of love. Stiles was convinced that that right there had to be a world record amount of love, which lead him to Googling Guinness World Records, and he slowly descended into the rabbit hole of link following that ended at roughly two am and Stiles reading a page about the metallurgy of the Bronze Age.

Scott's lycanthropy, in contrast, was almost a joke. Hell, Stiles made it a joke when his best friend told him about it. Except, it wasn't. It was a real thing, like something out of those terrible Twilight movies that Stiles resolutely did not watch except alone in his room when he knew no one would catch him, and Scott had it. This wasn't like all the other times. When it was cancer, or high cholesterol, everything had this impending sense of doom. He found a book about Lycanthropy and it didn't talk about fighting the wolf, it talked about accepting the wolf. Only the worst books about cancer told you to accept it. Those were the ones that Stiles had avoided when he was nine.

Suddenly, Scott didn't need his inhaler anymore. Scott, who had needed a rescue inhaler since he was six years old. Stiles had listened to many a nebulizer treatment over their lifelong friendship. He had even learned how to put the mask together and would help Scott by making stupid faces at him while he sat there and breathed. Asthma had a faint wheeze to it, too, that Stiles listened to in the spring as he laid next to Scott at night in his bed during sleepovers. One time, Scott had an asthma attack at lacrosse practice that had almost set Stiles off into one of his panic attacks. Except, Scott was just standing out in the field clawing at his pads and choking on air and there was no one helping him. Stiles grabbed the inhaler he kept in his own bag, one Scott had thought he'd lost a long time ago, and ran out in the middle of a play to jam it in his friend's mouth. He held the back of Scott's neck and pushed the canister down, screaming, "breathe, Scott! Fucking breathe!" in his ear. Scott's hands had twisted in Stiles' jersey and Stiles waited the allotted time before he pressed the canister down again. "Breathe, Scott. Breathe." They had ended up on their knees in the middle of the lacrosse field, clutching at each other as Scott gasped.

"Thank you," Scott said. Stiles just pulled him into a hug and didn't tell him about the books he'd read, or how he fished the information package out of the trash every time Scott got a new prescription and his nurse mother didn't need to read it because she already knew. Stiles didn't know, so he taught himself.

But Scott didn't need it anymore.

Their life all goes to Hell, after that. Mountain lions, and hot girlfriends, and Alphas who want them all dead or submissive. Stiles is still out on which of those would have been worse. It's not over, either. Jackson is adjusting, and Lydia's still in the hospital until the staff is sure she won't suddenly descend into septic shock, and Scott is too disgustingly in love with Allison to notice his best friend-almost brother has had a realization.

"How does it work?" Stiles asked.

Derek ignored him.

"You told me that if I cut off your arm, you would heal."

Derek just drove on silently. Stiles grabbed the steering wheel and swerved them off the road a little. Derek, with his preternatural skills, righted them quickly and killed the engine.

"You want to tell me what the fuck that was?"

"I asked you a question, damn well answer it, man." At the beginning of all this, Stiles would have flinched at the look on Derek's face. Shit, he had flinched in the past. But he's done being scared of Derek Hale and he's done begging for his life. Alpha or not, Stiles isn't backing down on this one.

Derek frowned. "What do you want to know, Stiles?" The inside of his car was too cool, the air conditioning always blasting, and Stiles wrapped his coat more securely around himself.

"How does the magic werewolf healing work? Why do you do, say a spell? 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will? I mean, it doesn’t even make sense. You can’t grow back an arm, you are not a starfish or a salamander or some other freaky creature- Okay, so, werewolf, freaky creature by definition, but Derek. Peter Hale fucking shook his mane like a lion and healed six year old scars. I want to know how it works.” 

“You want to tell me why?” 

Stiles glared, knowing that Derek had somehow figured this out. He was going to kill him. He was going to rip his intestines out and wear them as suspenders. He was going to... stomp out of the car like he was five years old. 

He trails through the forest, knowing that they aren’t that far from town and he could totally walk to his front door in half an hour MAX, but he gets side-tracked by the steady and obvious crunch of leaves behind him where Derek is seriously making sure Stiles knows he’s being followed. He wonders if it’s a courtesy since wolves are natural predators. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the fact that Derek was being courteous to him, except he found himself at the gate of the cemetery instead of his front door at the end of the thirty minutes and this was not his goal destination. 

“So, this is the opposite of what I was going for.” 

Derek snorted behind him. “Story of your life.”

“Why did you choose today to develop a sense of humor, huh? I’m having a existential crisis and you suddenly become Bozo the Clown. Can we reschedule this for tomorrow when I’ll be able to enjoy it?” 

Derek just breezed past him and pushed into the graveyard like a man on a mission. Stiles debated on stealing his car. It was a cool car, even Stiles could admit that like a man and he thought his Jeep was the only kind of car to have... ever. Stiles followed him, a little out of curiosity and a little out of necessity, and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. California can be a bitter and cold bitch whenever Stiles really needs to her to be lovely and warm and sunny. Mother Nature laughs at him in his worst moments, he’s found. Derek, however, he finds standing silently in front of a rather large mausoleum. 

“You would,” Stiles muttered, knowing Derek could hear him anyway. “A goddamn mausoleum like you’re in a Bela Lugosi movie.” He does notice the spiral etched into the capstones and over the door, surrounding the family name: Hale. 

“It’s not actually them, you know,” Derek whispered. “It’s ashes spread out into little urns with their names on them. Laura and I, we wanted to bury them in our tradition, but the cops had the house closed off. We thought- this would be for best.” Stiles nodded, for once in his life silent, and Derek turned expectantly towards him. “Well, I showed you mine.” 

“That is not how I wanted to hear anyone say that phrase to me,” he groused, but lead the way to her grave. He made it a priority that the flowers in her granite vases stayed fresh and that the grass was freshly mowed. He had an ongoing friendship with the landscaper and groundskeepers that sometimes even involved Christmas cards and knowing the names of their kids. He knew how to make friends in high places. How else do you think he got in good with Danny and managed to charm a police scanner from Gladys down at the station? He had his own skill set, thank you very much CollegePrep board, and it had served him greatly over his sixteen years. 

He liked to sit on the grass when he visited her. His dad came a couple of times a year, but Stiles tried to make it at least once a month. He would tell her about lacrosse, about Scott, about Melissa. He would make up stuff about his dad that made him sound a little bit less like a widower, and then he’d backtrack and tell her the truth because he couldn’t bear to lie to her about anything. He waxed lyrically about stupid stuff he read on the Internet that night and the score of the latest football debacle because he knows she would appreciate it. He likes to think that you learn a lot about a person from the stupid shit they say, because it shows you what they’re really thinking about. It probably doesn’t help that he kind of can’t turn the motor off in his brain, with or without the Adderall, and “I sort of just realized I was babbling all of this out loud.” 

He was surprised to find that Derek was sitting next to him, legs folded up and his arms rested on his knees, staring at his mother’s gravestone. “It would have cured her,” Derek confirmed. Stiles didn’t know if he had actually asked that out loud or if mind reading was a new talent of his. “Whatever it was, the bite would have cured her. If she had survived the bite to begin with.” 

“Cancer.”

They sat there silently for a moment before Derek asked, “what do the books say about it? How we heal?”

“It doesn’t. Hence the asking.”

“Any theories?” It’s the same brusque tone Derek uses when Stiles is saying things that are entirely idiotic and warrant a good slap to the back of the head, but he doesn’t do anything, doesn’t even look at him. 

“Werewolves are always warm, so I think you burn and generate a lot of energy. And I think that you can focus that energy, to make new cells grow and replace the damaged and dead ones. And cancer, it’s just a lot of bad cells that grow way past their welcome. So, you can eradicate bad cells and replace them in the same breath. I just wonder- how do you do it? How do you focus it? Could she had kept herself cancer free forever? I mean, wolves are linked with nature, and earth magic is all about life force. How long could I have kept her, if this has been an option?”

Derek frowned, but it was softer, more heartfelt than his usual scowl, and he took a deep breath. “She wouldn’t have lived forever. We age, we grow weak, we get hurt by silver and aconite, and we die of old age. We die when it is our time to die.”

“Old dogs don’t die,” Stiles smiled wanly, “they just fade away.” 

“I want you to know you live every day on my mercy,” Derek deadpans, half serious and half joking. 

“So when my dad told me that Roger ran away because he wanted to find a quiet place to die alone, he wasn’t kidding?”

Derek glared. “You didn’t believe him?”

“I was five, I liked living on my waterfront property in Egypt. Also: is that why you are never cold, even though all you wear is v-necks and that leather jacket? All that earth life force energy and stuff. Because, seriously, it’s cold as balls out here right now.” 

Derek grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him to his feet. “Stop bitching about the weather.” Stiles would have kept going, he could have worked up a right dander about the weather that would have lasted them until they made it back to Derek’s car, except Derek settled a warm and heavy arm around his shoulders, drawing him close against his side.

Just this once, Stile thought, he wasn’t going to question it.


End file.
